Woolford remains upbeat

Millwall midfielder Martyn Woolford believes the squad have a bright future ahead of them, despite being beaten 3-0 by Reading on Saturday.

The loss was new manager Ian Holloway’s first at The Den and the Lions were perhaps unfortunate to be beaten by a three-goal margin.

They had started brightly before Pavel Pogrebnyak capitalised on a Stephen Bywater error on 39 minutes, and Alex Pearce and Danny Williams sealed the points late on.

But Woolford praised Holloway's impact on the squad and insisted 3-0 was not a fair reflection of the 90 minutes. "He has done really well to organise us in such a short space of time," said Woolford.

The longer he has to bed everyone together, the better we are going to be.

On top of that we have got new signings coming in, and he (Holloway) is trying to get everyone singing off the same hymn sheet.

It bodes well once we are doing that. We have got a really good squad, a good manager and some good staff behind us. Soon the club will only start looking forward.

I didn't think we deserved to be beaten 3-0."

Woolford also felt the fact Reading were able to get their noses in front meant Millwall had to take a gamble to get back into the contest by throwing bodies forward, a tactic Holloway admitted afterwards had been the wrong one.

We started really well and were the better team in the first half," the midfield ace explained.

They managed to get the first goal, which is always an important one, and from then on we were always chasing the game.

It was tough because Reading are obviously a good organised team and it’s hard to chase games against teams like that

We've thrown everything at it, we’ve thrown all the strikers on and sometimes when you are chasing it, it opens up a little bit too much and that is what happened on Saturday.

In the first half we created plenty of chances and if one of them had dropped for us first rather than them, then it would have been a totally different game."

Woolford added: "We have got to take the confidence from the first half performance rather than looking at the score-line.

We have got to take the positives out of the game, and I think overall as a team we are going in the right direction.

We just need to keep believing in that, and keep believing the results will turn for us eventually."